One such provision can be found at 18 U.S.C. § 1030(g), which creates a civil cause of action for a party claiming to be aggrieved by the purported wrongdoings described in subsection (a). While civil causes of action are generally beyond the scope of this blog, having a civil cause of action buried in a statute designed to enable criminal prosecutions can be problematic for defendants facing the latter because the civil litigation, as it explores the contours of the statute and its internal definitions, tends to leave in its wake precedent that prosecutors can later use. Which is unfortunate, because how the statute may be interpreted in a civil context — which inherently can only reflect the particular dynamics of the particular civil dispute between these particular private parties — reshapes how the statute will be interpreted in a criminal context. Especially with a law like the CFAA, whose language always tempts excessive application, these civil precedents can vastly expand the government’s prosecutorial power over people’s technology use, and easily in a way Congress never intended. One should also never presume that the outcome of a civil dispute correlates to a result that is truly fair and just; miscarriages of justice happen all the time, often simply because it is often so difficult and expensive to properly defend against a lawsuit, especially one asserting a claim from such an imprecisely-drafted and overly broad statute like the CFAA.

I found myself blogging about journalist shield law at my personal blog today. As explained in that post, an experience as the editor of the high school paper has made newsman’s privilege a topic near and dear to my heart. So I thought I would resurrect a post I wrote a few years ago on the now-defunct blog I kept as a law student about how newsman’s privilege interacts with blogging as food for thought here. Originally written and edited in 2006/2007, with a few more edits for clarity now.

At a blogging colloquium at Harvard Law School [note: in April 2006] Eugene Volokh gave a presentation on the free speech protections that might be available for blogging, with the important (and, in my opinion, eminently reasonable) suggestion that free speech protections should not be medium-specific. In other words, if these protections would be available to you if you’d put your thoughts on paper, they should be available if you’d put them on a blog.Continue reading »